INa repeat from the previous presidential election, the skills went to the polls on February 9, 2025 to select a new government. The rich business owner Daniel Noboa heads for a runoff in April against the progressive candidate Luisa González. In a closely divided race, Noboa has ahead of González, both winning approximately 44% of the votes. Less than one percent of voting preferences have divided the two candidates.
To win the first round in Ecuador, a candidate must receive more than 50% of the vote, or 40% of the votes with a margin of 10 points compared to the nearest rival. Noboa defeated González in a Elections also closely disputed in 2023. The former president, Guillermo Lasso, who was faced with an inevitable dismissal, invoked an innovative provision of the 2008 Constitution known as MUERTE CRUZADA (Death assured mutually). This allows the president to dissolve the congress and to call for new early elections. Noboa later served the rest of Lasso’s mandate and is now re -election. Luisa González presents himself for the second time as a candidate of Revolución Ciudadana (Citizen Revolution), the party of former President Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
The election highlighted the divisions between the neoliberal policies of Noboa in matters of austerity, deregulation and privatization and revolución Ciudadana on the social financing of health care, education, infrastructure and others social priorities. Noboa is closely combined with American president Donald Trump, as well as the far -right president of Argentina, Javier Milei and the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. He also aligned himself with Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, in particular by indicating a desire to accept deportees from the United States.
Noboa, 37, is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School who was born in Miami from the banana magnate Álvaro Noboa, the richest man in the equator who had previously led five failed campaigns for the presidency. Daniel Noboa won the elections for the first time in the country’s legislature in 2021. After a strong debate performance in the 2023 elections, he went up from the surveys to place second in the first round. He then beat González in the second round.
Some have thrown this election as the third round of the 2023 general elections. In this case, April runoff could be characterized as a fourth round, with many of the same problems still at stake. Among the problems with which the equator is faced on violence fueled by drugs, high unemployment rates and An energy crisis that sparked a massive outing of Ecuador in the United States. The election underlined the highly polarized nature of the Ecuadorian society. Correa’s donors remember its decade as a period of economic strength, poverty rates and inequality and a decrease in violence. Correa’s opponents, ironically, blame the country’s current problems with drug trafficking, power outages and economic problems on his reign while claiming that Noboa has not had enough time to solve these problems. They threw Correa as an authoritarian and corrupt politician, while Correa’s donors release the exact charges in Noboa.
Faced with the violence fueled by drugs and a series of deadly prison riots, Noboa imposed a series of 10 siege states and declared an internal armed conflict which allowed him to send the military to patrol in streets and prisons. Opponents accuse Noboa of authoritarian surpassing which threatens civil freedoms. In a cheeky breakdown of the diplomatic protocol, he sent the police to the Mexico Embassy in Quito in April 2024 to arrest the former vice-president of Correa, Jorge Glas, who had asked for political asylum. This action has led Mexico to break diplomatic relations with the equator (since June 2024, Switzerland represents the diplomatic interests of the equator in Mexico and vice versa).
Since his initial campaign in 2023, Noboa has poorly maintained badly with his chosen vice-presidential candidate, Verónica Abad. After winning the elections, Noboa tried to withdraw Abad by sending him diplomatic missions, first in Israel and then in Türkiye. Under the equator’s electoral law, current politicians must withdraw while presenting themselves for a re -election so as not to use government resources inappropriate for their campaigns. Noboa advanced the doubtful argument that he did not need to comply with these regulations, because rather than presenting himself to re -election, he finished the truncated term of Lasso. When the Constitutional Court did not accept this argument, he appointed others to the post of vice-president and dismissed for several hours or days at a time, but a questionable legality. In this competition, Noboa has selected María José Pinto González Artigas as his running mate (the Ecuadorian electoral law requires a balance between the sexes on presidential tickets).
Noboa and González were at the head of a crowded field of 16 candidates. During the campaign, the National Electoral Council (CNE) eliminated the candidate from the right law, Jan Topić, the candidate of the order of the ballot because of the disputed charges he held from state contracts not authorized by electoral law. If he had not been eliminated from the race, Topić could have questioned up to 20% – from Noboa’s vote – which could have given González a victory in the first round. Most of the rest of the candidates varied politically from the center to the right. They represented personalist or customers interests and had trouble questioning one percent of the votes.
The only other left -wing candidate in the presidential race was Leonidas IzaThe President of the Aboriginal Nationalities Confederation of the Ecuador (Conaie) and the candidate for Pachakutik, an aligned political movement. Iza says that his platform also represents the interests of poor whites, Meszos, Afro-Ecuadurians and others. Unlike other candidates, Iza presented his campaign not as an individualistic or selfish effort but as a collective movement. He ranked third with more than five percent of the votes, in accordance with his hopes and expectations, but that had not indicated him.
Iza identifies as a Marxist and a Leninist as filtered through the objective of the organic ideas of the Peruvian theorist in the early 20th century José Carlos Mariátegui, but also as someone influenced by the Christian ideas of love for the humanity. His parents in fact named him according to Leonidas Proaño, the so-called “Bishop of the Indians” who helped organize rural communities in the 1960s and 1970s. The iza campaign represented persistent tensions between the powerful Basic social movements of the Ecuador and the Correa electoral project which brought him to the presidency for the first time in 2007. At the time, Correa tried but did not succeed in putting the Aboriginal and other movements under his control. Consequently, the two turned badly, in particular on the extractivist policies of Correa, even if they have endeavored to largely reduce the objectives of reducing poverty and inequalities. Before this election, an attempt at a range of left -wing groups to form a common front failed. It seems that these internal divisions never heal.
Since his training in 1995, Pachakutik has struggled to gain more than 2% of the votes for his presidential candidates. Significantly, Yaku Pérez, his candidate in the 2021 race, won 20% of the vote and failed to go to the second round and perhaps the presidency. Retrospectively, the total vote seems to be an anomaly which, among other factors, was due to the strong environmentalist references of Pérez. The persistence of flagrant racist feelings seems to be an important factor in the limitation of the call of Aboriginal and Afro-Chaadian candidates. Over the years, the projection of Pachakutik in local and parliamentary races has varied considerably.
On Sunday, there were also races for the extended National Assembly with 151 places and the Andean Parliament. The National Assembly is made up of provincial delegates, five national delegates and delegates representing Equatorians residing outside the country. All parliamentary races are by the list of parties rather than by individual candidates. The results of the elections for parliamentary races were also closely divided between the party of Noboa, the national democratic action (DNA) and the revolución Ciudadana de Gonzalez.
At this point, it is impossible to say which candidate has the upper hand in the April runoff race. Nothing in this election indicates that a new government will have simple solutions to the many problems of the equator, or that the deeply polarized political environment will be easily resolved. Faced with this reality, whoever wins in April will have to face a potentially antagonistic congress and popular expectations that could be impossible to meet.
Marc Becker Is the author among other works of Indians and leftists in the manufacture of modern indigenous movements of the equator (2008) and Pachakutik: Aboriginal movements and Electoral Policy in Ecuador (2011). He currently wrote a book on Philip Agee and the CIA in Ecuador in the early 1960s. He observed the Ecuadorian elections of 2025 with a delegation from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
